Wednesday, September 17, 2014

when it all falls away

I don't know how to write this with grace or with tact; I don't know how to put into words the hard truth.  These people are beautiful, this community we have is beautiful, the souls that are connected to me are beautiful.  Each of them in their own ways, each of them with their own stories.  Wrong has been done here, but so much right just is.

And yet, I don't belong here.  I never have, really.  There have been brief moments when what existed was beautiful and I had a place in it all, but generally this has not been the case.  Each to its season, I've been the new girl, the feminist, the old one, the leader, the newlywed.  And now it has all fallen away.  Everyone surrounding me is beautiful, and yet, the people who made my life beautiful here are gone.  Some have moved, some are gone for a season, others have fallen away of their own choosing.

Tonight I felt the wreckage of what once was, what never really was anyway.  I felt the weight of the not-belonging, the heaviness of knowing that I don't fit, that however much I may be wanted, however much I may be loved, however much I may want to fit, I just don't.  I'm older than them, I'm different, I'm hopelessly academic and out of place in this world of submarines and not-very-tasteful jokes and banding together against the world as if to prove that in so doing we're right.

I'm alone here.  My husband is gone on deployment and that leaves me with the stark reality of my situation.  There is nothing.  There is no one.  Some care, some reach out, some love me, and I'm still alone.

She left me behind, she knows, and yet the tide has shifted and it's pulling us irrevocably apart.  Fateful or fatalistic, I'm not sure which.  He's deeply racist and doesn't know it and it tears at the fabric of everything without anyone even sensing it.  She's hopelessly young, just beginning and full of promise, yet for me impossible to relate to on a deep level.  Each of these people are my friends, my brothers, my sisters.  And yet, I'm alone.

There has to be more to life than this.

Has to be.

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